FinMomenta to introduce new products; targets SMEs

After working in a bank for many years, Brahma Mahesh and his friend decided to do something in the burgeoning FinTech space. They zeroed in on lending, as only 5-6% of the population is covered by banks and NBFCs. Mahesh, along with four other co-founders, started FinMomenta last year, and launched its first product ‘Tachyloans’, a peer-to-peer lending platform in May this year.

With a strong tech team, FinMomenta has made both borrowing and lending easy. “A borrower has to fill in a form, upload his/her PAN details or Aadhaar. There is no manual intervention except physical verification, and after receiving all details as well as his/her credit score, the person is eligible for loan. All these take only a few minutes,” Mahesh says.

The platform uses a proprietary credit scoring model enabled by Artificial Intelligence and Big Data to assess the creditworthiness of applicants.

Though peer-to-peer lending platforms have been there for a few years now, it’s started gaining popularity only recently. Understanding the need to regularise the market, the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) recently finalised norms for the same and the apex bank is expected to release final guidelines soon.

Mahesh says, “Once P2P lending model is regularised, it is going to be the next revolution in the financial space. It’s going to be a $2-3 billion-market by 2020, and very soon, it might become one of the asset classes.”

Talking about the lending rate, he says, “Our lending rate is between 11.5% and 25%. If a borrower’s credit score is fantastic, then the lending rate will be less, and it increases with the decrease in score. We provide loans from Rs 50,000 to Rs 5 lakh and we are present in 50 cities.”  FinMomenta plans to launch the product in 100 cities by May 2018, and 200 cities by December.

“Apart from individuals, we are planning to launch loans to SMEs by the end of this year. So far, 165 loans worth Rs 2 crore have been disbursed, and by the end of this year, we are targeting 1,500 personal loans, and 7,000 by the end of next year,” adds Mahesh.

He is confident that the startup would touch 60,000 loans by 2021. “The overall market is too big and the working population alone is 60 crore,” he says. FinMomenta has 490 borrowers and 280 lenders on its platform. By the end of 2019, it plans to tap a couple of Asian countries. The startup is also innovating in terms of introducing new products and targeting new segments.

“We are providing school education loan and we are also looking at corporate HR loans,” he says.

With a team size of 17 members, FinMomenta upgrades its platform quite often by bringing in new features.  Talking about monetisation, Mahesh says, “In case of lenders, we get around 2% and it’s between 2-5% depending on risks in the case of borrowers.”